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0 pointshnfong21d ago0 comments

I can't tell if you think academia is "enforcing existing knowledge and consensus" or "preserving intellectual freedom"...

My personal take is that academia is doing very well on the former, and not much on the latter.

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5 comments · 1 top-level

Paracompact21d ago· 4 in thread

It depends on how you think the limited resources to perform research should best be allocated, and whether scientists should become more like doctors or lawyers so far as centralization of credentialing and professional gatekeeping goes. Doctors and lawyers have boards that can actually revoke your ability to practice for falling outside accepted standards. Science deliberately doesn't. Is that good or bad?

armchairhacker21d ago

They should be allocated towards intellectual freedom biased towards randomness.

Existing knowledge is preserved implicitly and be the public, and well-trodden ideas are furthered by industry. Academia is the best place for experiments, which are necessary to avoid stagnation, because there’s only so much obvious (low-hanging) research which isn’t experimental.

Related: “Can random experimental choice lead to better theories?”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26339137261421577

hnfongOP21d ago

My point is that the scientific establishment is already basically like those boards that can limit your ability to do research unless you have a license.

The "license" is a PhD (from a reputable institution) and publications in a select list of high profile journals.

I'm very curious why you'd think otherwise.

Paracompact21d ago

> The "license" is a PhD (from a reputable institution)

Maybe I'm biased as someone who has attained a PhD, but a PhD or master's is definitively not a license. It's almost necessary to have an advanced degree to be taken seriously, but that's not for reasons of normativity, but rather basic competence and a signal of investment. Your degree will not be revoked for the same reasons a doctor's or lawyer's license may be revoked (Francesca Gino lost her tenure, but not her degree). And IMO, your alma mater matters only as a proxy for your academic network; few in the academic world care if you went to MIT per se, but for the connections you made there.

I don't think there's an argument that the scientific establishment rejects many high-value contributions from uncredentialed/undercredentialed individuals.

> publications in a select list of high profile journals

Yeah, this is a serious issue. Although I don't know what it has to do with the question of whether the body of scientists proper should deliberate to establish consensus and distribute resources and prestige. If anything, Elsevier et al. have demonstrated that it can't be worse than letting the free market insert itself so insidiously.

Retric21d ago

Independent research by non PhD’s does occasionally get published, but it’s really difficult to meet the appropriate standards without a lot of very specific training.

There’s many objects discovered by amateur astronomers for example.

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